Origins
In 1968, while Shueisha was getting prepared to launch its first manga publication, Shōnen Jump, in order to compete with other magazines from rival companies (like Shōnen Magazine from Kodansha and Shōnen Sunday from Shogakukan), Nagai was invited to be one of the first manga artists publishing in the new magazine. He contemplated this, since he had to design a long-running series instead of the autoconclusive short stories that he had been developing until that point. He accepted and the series became a big success, being the first for Nagai and making Shōnen Jump sell more than one million copies. With Harenchi Gakuen, Nagai became the originator of ecchi manga, opened the door for a series of taboo-shattering gag comics and also became the symbol of an entire generation. This work has influenced Japanese society radically, effecting both social mores and what was considered appropriate for manga.
Harenchi Gakuen started with the idea of making a manga around a school. Nagai liked the word "Harenchi" (scandal), used commonly to advertise adult movies. For him, scandal and school were like oil and water, and he thought that mixing them would be funny. That's how the name Harenchi Gakuen came to be. At first, Nagai didn't have an idea of what stories to develop, but his assistant at the time was boasting about how he had peeped on the girls during their physical examinations from a hole in the roof of his school. That gave him the idea of what would be the stories. Originally, open erotic references didn't appear in Harenchi Gakuen. The first physical examination scenes only showed from the shoulders up. But the many girls that appeared and their images became popular. The editor asked Nagai to go further, which Nagai was eager to do.
The inspiration for Harenchi Gakuen came from the West. Nagai liked foreign movies, and used to read Playboy magazine. For the depiction of breasts, he took particular inspiration from the Venus de Milo. According to Nagai, what he in fact drew was not about eroticism per se, but about Japan's culture of shame. He wanted embarrassment to be the eroticism of the stories.
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