It’s a “quirk” in the way the JVM looks up the zoneinfo file. See Bug ID 6456628.
The easiest workaround is to make /etc/localtime a symlink to the correct zoneinfo file. For Pacific time, the following commands should work:
# sudo cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.dist
# sudo ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles /etc/localtime
I haven’t had any problems with the symlink approach.
Edit: Added “sudo” to the commands.