More generally this falls into a discussion of context-specific vs context-free grammars. Of which C++ falls into the former, Java falls into the latter.
Pretty much every programming language has a nicely parseable context-free "rough syntax" (my term I just invented) that can be written down formally for the language documentation and a parsing tool. And then every language also has a notion of "well-formed programs", which introduces a whole bunch of additional constraints on what programs should actually be accepted by compiler frontend.
Well-formedness includes type checking. But even without full type checking that can be done later, it also includes things like being aware, in C, of whether a given identifier is declared as a typedef in the current scope. So while C has a nice context-free "rough syntax" formally specified in the standard, its actual input language is context sensitive.
As for Java, the first example that comes to mind is that constructors must have the same name as the class they belong to. This "choose whatever identifier you like, but at some later point repeat that exact same identifier" is a very typical example of something that is not context-free.
You might disagree whether this constraint is part of what you consider Java's "grammar". So the answer to your question depends on what language level you are thinking of. But whichever level you apply to Java, you should apply the same to C++. C++ also has a context-free "rough syntax" in its standard.
It's Turing complete because it could simulate a Turing machine, not because of metaprogramming. The language brainfuck is Turing complete, for example.
Checking if a Brainfuck program is well formed (i.e. can be run) is a linear time operation. In C++ this can take forever. They have different complexities.
The original comment was about Turing completeness, and it was defined incorrectly. I was giving an example of a dead-simple language that was Turing complete, because the claim was that metaprogramming made C++ Turing complete.
The claim wasn’t that C++ is Turing complete, that’s trivially true. The claim was that C++’s grammar is Turing complete. I don’t know if that’s exactly the right way to phrase it, but C++’s template expansion stuff is Turing complete.
Context free means something different to what you're saying here. This is a good discussion of this topic, I never knew C++ was so irregular and informal.
I'd be very surprised if Java's grammar were context-free. Do you have a source for this? I wasn't able to find one with a quick search.