Japan's Power Giant Bankrolls Green's Campaign | Part 1

Bottom Line Up Front:

• Governor Green signed a Strategic Partnering Agreement in Tokyo on October 6, 2025, alongside Japan's Energy for a New Era (JERA)'s global CEO.

• A Honolulu banker introduced Josh Green to JERA, Japan's largest power company.

• JERA has filed notice that it is now seeking approval for a $2 billion power plant on Oʻahu.

• Green has taken more than $17,000 from JERA-affiliated individuals across 2024 and 2025. JERA employees, construction unions, Hawaiian Electric personnel, and bank executives all appear among his donors this cycle.

Civil Beat reported in October that Governor Green was introduced to the company by Central Pacific Bank Chairman Emeritus Paul Yonamine, described as a booster of business ties between Hawaiʻi and Japan and a volunteer advisor to the governor on Japan affairs. Hawaii Business Magazine has quoted him as the governor's special adviser on energy matters.

At the time, Paul Yonamine was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Central Pacific Financial Corp., and Executive Chairman of its subsidiary, Central Pacific Bank. He also sits on the board of directors of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation as an outside director under Japan's Companies Act, appointed in 2019. SMBC holds more than $1.8 trillion in assets. Yonamine is its only director from outside Japan.

SMBC is one of the three Japanese megabanks that dominate liquefied natural gas project finance. It has financed JERA before, joining JBIC, the Asian Development Bank, MUFG and Societe Generale on a JERA gas plant in Bangladesh. The agreement Green signed in Tokyo commits the State of Hawaiʻi to "leverage JERA's relationships with leading U.S. and Japanese financial institutions."

Yonamine is a volunteer. He files no financial disclosures with the State Ethics Commission. He registers as no one's lobbyist. No recusal requirement applies to him. He retired from both the CPF and CPB Boards of Directors on November 6, 2025, one month after the Tokyo signing, but kept the seat in Tokyo.

Green's Campaign Contributions

Green's campaign filed its disclosure with the Campaign Spending Commission on July 6, covering January 1 through June 30. It reports $69,444.12 raised in six months and $1,924,055.64 in the bank. The governor spent more than he raised and still finished with two million dollars. His three Democratic challengers reported raising nothing at all.

JERA executives have been giving to Green since 2024. Henry Curtis of Ililani Media documented more than $17,000 in contributions from JERA-affiliated individuals across 2024 and 2025. The largest came from Erik Montague, JERA's Vice President of Development, who gave $6,000 across four contributions. Montague is named in the Strategic Partnering Agreement as JERA's Strategic Coordinator, the company's designated liaison to the State of Hawaiʻi.

The campaign recorded four contributions from James Vigil, Senior Management Executive Advisor and a board member of JERA Americas. Vigil served as Senior Managing Executive Officer for Business Development at JERA in Tokyo before relocating to Honolulu in January 2022. He gave Green’s campaign $1,000, $2,000, $125, and $250.

Fourteen Hawaiian Electric executives gave this cycle on January 15. In a single day, the campaign logged $8,850 from HECO and Hawaiian Electric Industries personnel. President and CEO Scott Seu gave $5,000 this cycle alone. Joseph Viola is senior vice president for regulatory affairs. Rebecca Matsushima is vice president for resource procurement. Both gave on January 15. Regulation and procurement are the fight over this project.

The same day, construction trades also maxed out their contributions. The Hawaii Regional Council of Carpenters PAC gave $6,000. The Hawaii Laborers PAC gave $6,000. Later in the spring HPM Building Supply, Island Structural Contracting, BKF & Associates and GPRM Prestress each gave $6,000. Contractors and trade PACs account for roughly $36,000 of the total. These industries have a reason behind their interest. JERA's proposal projects more than 1,100 temporary construction jobs over three to five years and roughly 170 permanent ones.

The bank in the middle of the Japan deal gave $8,000. Central Pacific Bank executives contributed across six entries, led by Chief Financial Officer David Morimoto at $4,500. On June 30, the campaign recorded $1,500 from Nozomi Heenan, listed as Chief of Staff at Paul Yonamine LLC.

The Agreement

Green signed The Strategic Partnering Agreement in Tokyo on October 6, 2025, alongside JERA's global CEO. The recitals say moving away from petroleum could relieve Hawaiʻi consumers, "saving them an average of at least $340 annually." In March, Matthias Fripp, an electrical engineer who taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for a decade and now directs global research at the pro-decarbonization think tank Energy Innovation, told legislators that the spreadsheet behind the figure had omitted the cost of the natural gas itself. At the March 12 briefing, Fripp testified that a series of errors "collectively inflated the supposed benefits of LNG by up to $1.2 billion".

The Energy Office called that incorrect, and in all caps, in a March 13 Instagram post. State Chief Energy Officer Mark Glick told the Star-Advertiser that critics had a fundamental misunderstanding of the models. The newspaper sent him a screen recording. He confirmed the flaw days later while insisting the study was accurate anyway. The office retracted the scenario on March 19 and republished the revised study in May, leaning now on a scenario whose net present value it raised from $150 million to $651 million. On those revised numbers, Hawaiʻi Natural Energy Institute Director Rick Rocheleau says the savings work out to less than a penny per kilowatt-hour.

The final recital commits the parties to advancing "the Hawaiʻi State Energy Office's Alternative Fuel, Repowering and Energy Transition Study dated January 2025." The agreement bound the State to advancing the study that collapsed five months later.

Initiative (f) calls for "regulatory reforms including, but not limited to, new State directed procurement process for power ..." Nine months later, Hawaiian Electric told the Public Utilities Commission that the JERA arrangement is a pre-packaged deal from a foreign-owned company presented as the only choice. The utility wrote that there is no bidding and no competition for what would rank among the largest infrastructure projects in state history. HECO is not disinterested. It had talked with JERA about working together, the talks fell apart, and its own filing seeks expedited approval to add up to 500 megawatts of firm generation through its RFP instead. 

The agreement creates no legally binding obligations except two sections. One is confidentiality, which bars disclosure of technical and financial details without written consent, and further provides that neither party may so much as name the other in any public announcement without prior written consent. A sitting government signed away its ability to unilaterally speak the name of its private counterparty with a $2 billion public-infrastructure arrangement. The other binding section sets a five-year term, Hawaiʻi governing law, and routes every dispute to Hawaiʻi courts.

Initiative (m) commits the parties to establishing "a coalition of willing partners in Hawaiʻi," specifically energy utilities, IPP power generators, and project developers. Instead, four months later The Coalition for Hawaiʻi's Energy Future surfaced on February 26, 2026 with more than 50 members, and they were health centers, farm bureaus, Aloha United Way, Native Hawaiian leaders, cost-of-living nonprofits. Not the industry bloc the SPA describes but a validator coalition in favor of a fossil fuel campaign. Henry Curtis of Life of the Land, an intervenor against the project who has done the most thorough reporting on it, reported that the coalition was created by JERA.

There is no binding commitment to build anything, invest anything, or deliver any savings to any ratepayer. The $2 billion, the five recommended thermal facilities, the coalition, the workforce program, none of it binding. The only thing that is binding is the parties' mutual obligation to keep each other's secrets and to seek permission before naming each other in public. 

The agreement designates the State's point of contact as Mark Glick, the same official whose office produced the study, denied its error, and conceded only after enough push back.

Hawaiian Electric Company

Glick has described a timeline. The administration first held talks with JERA in 2023, when the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans for regional hydrogen hubs. Hawaiʻi was not the right fit for a hub, Glick said, but JERA returned that summer to discuss LNG after the Maui wildfires. Those fires had dealt HECO a devastating financial blow and raised the specter of massive liability and potential bankruptcy. According to Glick, JERA said it was interested in investing in Hawaiian Electric and helping cover that potential liability as part of an overall LNG plan. "Post-Lahaina, it became much more serious interest," Glick said, adding that his office then viewed the proposal in an entirely different light.

JERA's capital is substantial. When the state was negotiating, Hawaiian Electric Industries' entire market value hovered around $2 billion. JERA's proposed investment was roughly the price of the whole company.

A foreign company offered capital to a utility drowning in wildfire liability. In January 2026, fourteen of that utility's executives gave the governor money on a single day. Six months later, once JERA proposed owning its own generating company rather than selling power to HECO, the utility began calling the deal a no-bid contract.

Oʻahu ratepayers pay the highest electricity prices in the country. They are being asked to underwrite a thirty-year commitment justified by a number the state has since erased, through a process with no competitors, by an administration funded in part by the people who would build it.

What the structure needs is competitive bidding. It needs analysis produced by someone other than the agency reporting to the official who already signed.

The money behind this deal did not stop at the governor's campaign.

Part two will be published soon and it follows the same donors, and the same consultants, into the Lieutenant Governor race.

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