Designing Legacy: A Landscape Architecture Professor Keeps Culture Alive
Keiji Uesugi shares a profession with family members stretching back 15 generations—a lineage rooted in shaping the land itself.
Uesugi is the interim chair and professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, who is also a landscape architect professionally, specializing in Japanese garden design.
His father, Professor Emeritus Takeo Uesugi, a world-renowned landscape architect, taught at Cal Poly Pomona for 35 years and designed one of the most popular and beautiful sites on campus, the Aratani Japanese Garden.
The younger Uesugi is proud of his family’s legacy rooted in landscape architecture and his father’s work on campus.
“Our work is so tangible,” he said. “That’s what is so powerful about the discipline I’m in. It’s all around us, and we kind of take it for granted. Being able to have the CPP garden here that my father designed is so hugely impactful.”
Now, Uesugi is making sure legacy of the Japanese American community is not forgotten and is spearheading research on the rehabilitation of Japanese
internment camps.
Uesugi proposed and now teaches a landscape architecture class that fulfills the GE requirement for ethnic studies, LA 2250. This class dives into the Japanese American experience and its intersection with California’s development and landscape history.
Uesugi reflected on his role as a professor and his experience leading an ethnic studies class rooted in landscape architecture.
“I feel the responsibility as faculty to do what I can to ensure my students are successful in achieving what they need,” he said. “Our stories are based on place and the diaspora of our country. We are so diverse with students coming from different places with different backgrounds. It’s moving and inspiring as an instructor to honor the efforts many of our students take to get here.”
In his ethnic studies class, Uesugi discusses how Japanese immigrants who came to America started in various laborious occupations, like farmers and landscapers.
Uesugi noted how many students in classes are not aware of Japanese history in the US, specifically in California.
“A hundred and twenty-five thousand people of Japanese ancestry during WWII were forced from their homes and lost their properties and businesses, like their farms,” he said. “They were then put into incarceration camps across the US, with two in California. My students are so shocked and often tell me they never learned about this in high school classes.”
One of these internment camps, Manzanar, was the primary incarceration camp for Japanese Americans living in Los Angeles, with close to 10,000 immigrants. Most of the prisoners were farmers.
The administration of the camp soon recognized that most of the inmates were gardeners and allowed them to start building gardens in the barracks of the camp.
“They started to build these gardens in front of the camp mess hall with trees, rocks, grass, and water,” Uesugi said. “These places were for solace, peace, mental wellness, and spirituality. People look at these gardens in hindsight and recognize they were also places of resistance.”
The gardens remain in place today as a National Historic Site, and have been rehabilitated to look similar to what they did during WWII.
Uesugi has taken students there for field trips in the past, most notably in 2023, when they volunteered to help clear out debris in areas of the park that had been damaged by Hurricane Hilary.
Uesugi noted that some students had never picked up a shovel or pickaxe in their life, and the volunteer work was laborious yet rewarding.
“Talk about learn by doing,” he said. “It doesn’t get any more visceral than that.”
Now more than ever, historic and national park sites are facing erasure, including taking down signs and monuments. Preservation of these sacred places, especially the internment site for Japanese Americans, is crucial. Restorative work is being done not only physically, but also digitally now.
Uesugi leads a team of students who do 3D scanning and modeling to help preserve the park. In 2024, he and a group of students attended a conference at Manzanar discussing gardens as symbols of peace. There, they took scans of the various gardens at Manzanar and turned them into digital models that can then be transformed into walk-throughs and fly-throughs.
Undergraduate and graduate students are still continuing their work in the digital model space to recreate these gardens through a teaching practicum class as research assistants.
Uesugi does everything he can to help get grants to continue his preservation work of the internment camp gardens.
Beyond his work at the gardens, Uesugi is providing opportunities for his students in other ways. He is the coordinator of the firm day for landscape architecture majors. Students can meet with professional firms to meet with their peers, network and even have interviews with practitioners.
A large majority of the firms present this year were alumni of the CPP landscape architecture program. Uesugi said it was like a reunion and was super nostalgic.
“The payoff of just seeing everyone together is so enjoyable,” he said. “It’s a lot of work to put together, but it is so worth it. The organic conversations are so special.”
The intersection for Uesugi in all of these areas of his profession are tied back to CPP and his love of his work. He is proud to be a landscape architect. “Landscapes are storytelling devices,” he said. “We are the shapers and advocates for the land. We need to properly respect nature and be that mouthpiece for Earth. Creating beauty and empathy in spaces help bring about humanity. That’s the power in what we do.”