People in the thread have given a few different reasons why Java is verbose but in my opinion, it's not so much the language specifics or the culture but the combination of static typing together with the inheritance and class-focussed design.

A lot of the terseness of other languages is the result of dynamism (Ruby, Python) and so on which basically gives you two thirds of the infamous patterns that people complain about more or less for free, and for other static languages that are predominantly functional a lot of the boilerplate simply does not exist because the primary unit of computation is the function and that spares you a hell of a lot of complication.

It's the C++/Java class of languages that all suffer from the same verbosity and complexity and I don't think it's because the particular languages do anything wrong specifically but that the combination of paradigms simply leads to large, complicated structures.