swagger-codegen contains a template-driven engine to generate documentation, API clients and server stubs in different languages by parsing your OpenAPI / Swagger definition.
This was a red herring. My spec contained spaces in the tag names, but that wasn't the issue; the problem was that my spec did not contain any definitions, as everything was simple objects inline.
If tags in a swagger spec contain a space, the java client generated by swagger-codegen will not compile.
Here is an example/repro (requires mvn, java) :
1. Make a temporary working directory
2. Download swagger-codegen-cli.jar
3. Invoke swagger-codegen-cli
4. Compile the output
Result: