Barack Obama has called Hawaii "an experiment in racial harmony." Pico Iyer travels to Honolulu and finds a place where East has truly merged with West—a piece of America with a Japanese soul

"Toto," I felt like saying, "I don't think we're in Kansai (or Western Japan) anymore." An Ecuadorian panpiper was serenading me and all the other visitors to Byodo-in, a classic Japanese Buddhist temple, with, of all unexpected songs, "The Sound of Silence." Sculptures of Thai angels, for some reason, stood outside the gift shop. A machine nearby informed me that if I put fifty-one cents in a slot, I could get one cent back, stamped to commemorate my visit to this sacred space. Marriages, I read, could be performed for one hundred dollars in the picturesque setting, and at the admission booth, a visitor was frantically asking a sumo-sized Pacific attendant if she could buy fish food here.

Byodo-in, forty minutes north of Waikiki by car, is meant to be a replica of one of the most celebrated temples near Kyoto, a monument so iconic in Japan that it is represented on the back of every ten-yen coin and is visited by teams of history lovers eager to see the complex (also known as the Phoenix Hall), which has stood serenely outside the ancient capital for almost a thousand years. Here in Hawaii, however, tradition is something that is tweaked, improved upon, and offered for commercial photo shoots for "$300 minimum, and up." A retired Marine Corps brigadier general was about to sign copies of his three-volume work, War in the Pacific, I learned, though this did not seem the title guaranteed to appeal to people seeking traces of old Japan in America. And the Ecuadorian panpiper Chaskis, the temple's literature assured me, was piercing the traditional stillness in order "to create a peaceful atmosphere that mesmerizes its listeners."

Around me in the Valley of the Temples, the lush tropical hillside, the blazing December light, and the scent of frangipani could not have been further from the bare-treed austerity of a winter day in Kyoto. Catholic and Episcopalian pavilions stood here and there in the near-distance, presiding over green patches of lawn on which, in good Hawaiian style, signs had been planted to offer the best deals on some choice real estate ("exclusive family estates," "ocean-view sites available"). Until I'd made the drive out here, nobody had thought to tell me that the Valley of the Temples is, in fact, a cemetery (the Byodo-in replica itself, built in 1968, is actually a temple).

Things take on unexpected colors in the cross-cultural light of Honolulu. For twenty years now, I have been traveling back and forth every season between Japan, where my heart lies and I do my writing, and California, where my doctor and dentist reside and I pay my taxes. Why not stop off in the middle sometime, I'd thought, and see if I could weave my two lives together for a few days? One Honolulu resident in every three is, after all, of Japanese descent, and the most conspicuous visitors for many years—still almost twenty percent of the state's 7.4 million annual tourists—have been trendy young couples and wealthy families from Saitama or Nagoya. Hawaii, and especially Honolulu, was not just the piece of America that was literally halfway to Japan; it was also the place that had in parts made itself over to serve a Japanese market. Or, to put it more loftily, it was, in Barack Obama's words, the place famous as "the true melting pot, an experiment in racial harmony."