Why friend directive is missing in Java?

Question

I was wondering why Java has been designed without the frienddirective that is available in C++ to allow finer control over which methods and instance variables

Answer 1

In general i think it was because of the added cognitive complexity and low number of cases in which it creates an improvement.

I would say that the extremely huge number of lines of java in production at this moment can attest that the friend keyword is not really a big loss :).

Please see @dwb's answer for some more specific reasons.