Java has the misfortune (especially in older versions of the language) of limited syntax that encourages bloated frameworks that promise to marginally decrease boilerplate, combined with a VM that's robust enough to actually handle the bloat fairly gracefully.

If you ignore that stuff and write Java programs in a straightforward way (accepting its verbosity, or possibly using code generation instead of runtime frameworks in places where lisp folks would use a bunch of macros), and avoid unnecessary heap allocations, they can be pretty fast.