The confusion around whether or not Java has pointers comes from people comparing it with C or C++. In Java, you can't dereference a pointer to an Object and get some sort of Object value. Similarly, you can't perform an "address of" operation on a primitive value and get a pointer to that value. Similarly, you can't pass-by-reference (in the sense of the parent article) or do pointer arithmetic in Java.

While Java technically has pointers (in the sense that it has pointer types), it has dulled them so that you can't hurt yourself with them the same way that C (and C++) permit.