Ed Shimamoto was born behind barbed wire in 1944.

He was 1 year old when the U.S. government finally let his family leave that Japanese-American internment camp in Rohwer, Ark. But they had nothing to go back to; the strawberry and grape farm in California that was their livelihood before World War II was as good as gone.

So they headed north to St. Louis, because they heard it was a friendly place to live, meaning not as prejudiced as other cities.

As their way of showing gratitude to St. Louis, Shimamoto’s family and 23 others started the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Japanese festival 40 years ago. This was his parents’ gift, or “omiyage,” to St. Louis.

“It’s a matter of fulfilling my parents’ dream,” Shimamoto said Wednesday while propping up 20-foot-long bamboo poles with flying carp by the Japanese garden’s pond for this weekend’s festival. “I work to preserve that dream.”

For this 40th anniversary of the long-popular festival, those 24 families are being honored with their family crests printed on the back of this year’s festival T-shirts.

The festival draws more than 40,000 people each Labor Day weekend and is indicative of how St. Louis has become an understated U.S. hub of Japanese culture.

St. Louis is home to the biggest Japanese garden, the largest Japanese festival and arguably the most authentic Japanese tea house outside of Japan. It sustains a sister city partnership with Suwa, of the Nagano Prefecture in Japan, and it’s home to one of the country’s oldest Japanese drumming, or taiko, groups.

Much of that is thanks to a small wave of Japanese-American families who first migrated to St. Louis from Arkansas’ internment camps in 1945. Executive Order 9066 forced 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans to give up their homes and jobs and live in shoddy barrack camps as a wartime “security” measure, now remembered as a massive violation of their civil rights.

After the war, 435 of them ended up in St. Louis.

Some had stopped or found jobs here while edging toward Chicago. But even during the war, St. Louis had a reputation for welcoming Japanese people. Washington University’s then-chancellor George Throop, for example, took in 30 Japanese college students during the war, writing in 1942 that Japanese-American citizens “have exactly the same rights as other students who desire to register in the University.”

In the 1970s, some of these families got the idea of building a Japanese garden. They believed a garden would symbolically embody Japanese culture, keep it alive in St. Louis, and educate people in a city where diversity is often a binary matter. A big hand in logistics from Missouri Botanical Gardens guru Peter Raven and design from respected Japanese gardener Koichi Kawana brought the 14-acre garden into being.

Around the same time, families held early versions of the festival in church basements and parking lots. The first to be held at the Missouri Botanical Garden four decades ago was “more like a picnic than anything,” said Shimamoto’s older brother, Dick, but it brought in 10,000 people. There was kite-making, home cooking by women in the Japanese American Citizens League, and a lot of exhibits, showcasing items from samurai swords to kimonos.

Every festival has been held with the mindset of “kodomo no tame ni,” which means, “for the sake of the children,” said Dave Lowry, chairman of the Japanese Activities Committee that helps organize the festival.

The festival, he said, is a way of commemorating that Japanese culture, though nestled in a small community, survives in St. Louis.

“It’s really a way of celebrating that we lived another year,” Lowry said.