Java is easy to understand and it's hard to shoot yourself in the foot with (no raw memory access, unless you use JNI/JNA). Garbage collector makes memory management a non-issue. Exceptions make error handling easy. OOP is a simple concept and many real-world programming tasks can be laid out as a nice class hierarchy. Java's changes are few (as opposed to some other languages), feel logical (to me at least), and solve real problems. Most of "syntactic sugar" features don't make the code using them less readable.

Java also supposedly runs on everything. And, you could as well write Android apps in it.