1.2 seconds was hello world in clojure, the Java hello world presented the numbers below, so it's mostly clojure that is slow:

$ time java Hello Hello world 0.04user 0.01system 0:00.12elapsed 43%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 15436maxresident)k 29672inputs+64outputs (82major+3920minor

While 120ms elapsed is not stellar, it's rarely a problem with how the JVM ecosystem looks.