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

Completely agree with spaceghost's statement in his answer

Contrary to popular opinion, here are many cases, in particular for infrastructure capabilities, where friend access leads to BETTER design, not worse design.

My example is simple - if a class A has to provide a special "friend" interface to class B in java we have to place them into the same package. No exceptions. In that case if A is a friend of B and B is a friend of C, A has to be a friend of C which isn't always true. This "friendship transitivity" breaks encapsulation more then any problems which C++ friendship could lead to.