It was a language design decision.
From the sun white paper The Java Language Environment:
Most studies agree that pointers are one of the primary features that
enable programmers to inject bugs into their code. Given that
structures are gone, and arrays and strings are objects, the need for
pointers to these constructs goes away. Thus, Java has no pointer data
types. Any task that would require arrays, structures, and pointers in
C can be more easily and reliably performed by declaring objects and
arrays of objects. Instead of complex pointer manipulation on array
pointers, you access arrays by their arithmetic indices. The Java
run-time system checks all array indexing to ensure indices are within
the bounds of the array.
You no longer have dangling pointers and trashing of memory because of
incorrect pointers, because there are no pointers in Java.
