I have not flown out of JFK T8 with JAL yet, but I fly out of T8 often enough with AA and almost always with mobile boarding passes. T1 has always been unnecessarily tyrannical and probably because it is solely international with no US-based airlines it is able to get away with things like that.

At plenty of US airports if you have a scannable US drivers license/state ID you can even get through TSA without your boarding pass! (Presumably because TSA can then just match/verify your name with all the manifests loaded in their system.)