  We present results for light meson masses and pseudoscalar decay constants
from the first of a series of lattice calculations with 2+1 dynamical flavors
of domain wall fermions and the Iwasaki gauge action. The work reported here
was done at a fixed lattice spacing of about 0.12 fm on a 16^3\times32 lattice,
which amounts to a spatial volume of (2 fm)^3 in physical units. The number of
sites in the fifth dimension is 16, which gives m_{res} = 0.00308(4) in these
simulations. Three values of input light sea quark masses, m_l^{sea} \approx
0.85 m_s, 0.59 m_s and 0.33 m_s were used to allow for extrapolations to the
physical light quark limit, whilst the heavier sea quark mass was fixed to
approximately the physical strange quark mass m_s. The exact rational hybrid
Monte Carlo algorithm was used to evaluate the fractional powers of the fermion
determinants in the ensemble generation. We have found that f_\pi = 127(4) MeV,
f_K = 157(5) MeV and f_K/f_\pi = 1.24(2), where the errors are statistical
only, which are in good agreement with the experimental values.
