When the Japanese American Citizens League was born 75 years ago, the citizenship picture for Japanese-Americans was bleak, and growing worse each year.

"Let's go back to Pearl Harbor," said John Tateishi, executive director of the league, speaking by phone from its San Francisco headquarters. "By 1941 there were in California over 100 bills or statutes that discriminated very openly against Japanese-Americans.

"Chief among them were the alien land laws and the federal law that prohibited any Japanese immigrant from becoming an American citizen."

Times, of course, have radically changed. The JACL, which tomorrow will convene its national convention in Honolulu, has seen prospects improve immeasurably for its core members, who are practicing citizenship at respected echelons. The keynote speaker at the event's closing banquet on Saturday, for example, will be Norman Mineta, the nation's transportation secretary.

As an organization, the league is best known in recent decades for its work in the 1970s and '80s to win reparations for Japanese-Americans who had been interned or suffered other discriminatory treatment during World War II. That was a battle that Tateishi helped launch and that the league finally won in 1988.

Although some things may have dropped off the to-do list for the noted civil-rights organization, others have been penciled in. For one, said member Mari Matsuda, a visiting law professor at the University of Hawai'i, the JACL feels a strong tug toward defending Arab-Americans who are in danger of suffering similar discrimination as a result of terrorism and the Iraq war.

"The JACL has been outspoken on the Patriot Act and immigrant bashing," she said. "We know what that's like, to have your loyalty questioned just because of your race."

The league finds itself at a kind of crossroads, the national leaders setting their sights on social justice for a more general Asian-American community, particularly the immigrant population.

The Isle chapter, which is hosting the convention, has broadened its agenda even further.

"The thing that attracted me to the Honolulu chapter was it was starting to look at other civil-rights issues," said Hawai'i Civil Rights Commission executive director William Hoshijo.

The Hawai'i group supported Native Hawaiian self-determination and opposed certain constitutional changes, including a ban on same-sex marriage and proposals that would diminish protections for criminal defendants.

"It doesn't have to be a racial minority, but anyone who is disenfranchised or marginalized," said Karen Nakasone, a criminal attorney newly elected as the chapter president.

At local and national levels, the JACL is facing similar, twin challenges: drawing the younger generation into its mission and seeing that, in the face of increasing multiculturalism, the organization doesn't lose touch with its Japanese cultural roots.

The cultural middle ground inhabited by those of part-Japanese ancestry will form the basis of one convention forum, a session on the "hapa," or multiethnic population. One participant, Shayna Coleon, is a fourth-generation (yonsei) descendant, who believes the concept of what it means to be Japanese-American is being redefined by the young.

"People tell me I don't look Japanese," she said, "and I think, what does a Japanese person look like nowadays? Those are all the barriers we're trying to look at."

Nationally, the organization is worried about an annual membership attrition of 9 percent, as younger members haven't taken the place of the nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, who have been the league's traditional mainstays.

Locally, there's a similar interest in drawing the young while honoring the old guard. Susan Kitsu, who just turned over the reins as Hawai'i chapter president and is chairing the convention, said the nearly four years of planning for the event began with a discussion of core values, known by the Japanese term "kachikan."

Among those values: "kansha," or thankfulness, a principle that directed convention planners to include tributes to war veterans and other heroes of the past; and "sekinin," or responsibility.

"Adults have responsibility to our youth, which is why we started the 'Aha 'Opio Youth Diversity Summit," Kitsu said, referring to a segment of the convention that involves youth in discussion of campus hate crimes and other relevant civil-rights topics.

The national group has had the harder row to hoe in this regard. Tateishi said the JACL is still working against an "old paradigm" that gives Asian-Americans short shrift in public policy debates.

"Asians are a footnote in those discussions," he said. "And even being a footnote would be better than an afterthought, which is what we are much of the time.

"In California, we're the second-largest minority group, after Latinos, but we're still running a distant third, after African-Americans, in the minds of the politicians," Tateishi said.

"We have a very different view of our place in the world than Asians and Pacific Islanders do in Hawai'i."

The local chapter believes Hawai'i has an experience worth telling an audience concerned with civil rights, Kitsu said.

"It's one example of how it can work," she said. "I don't think we are 'it.' I don't think we have 'arrived.' We've got a long way to go.

"But I think we've done a good job of getting along," she said. "You can see it at our potlucks — all the different kinds of food are on the table."