I'm not sure I appreciate the distinction; as far as I'm concerned an API to draw primitives on a canvas => graphics library. Whether or not the library has additional functionality is entirely irrelevant.
Pointless semantics aside, I didn't know those two libraries existed, and am quite intrigued; one of my current research projects is a rapid prototyping framework whose server makes use of Java's dynamic class loading to allow users to replace simulation rules on the fly (much like Second Life). However the client has become unacceptably sluggish; I'd been thinking I'd need to port it to get back reasonable performance. I take it these Java OpenGL libraries have performance comparable to C++ implementations?