It's been a while since I removed the old monkey patched import function from Jep. I finally got around to adding a nice import hook, so now stuff like this works without breaking things like numpy:

$ java -jar jepp.jar console.py
>>> import java.util
>>> from java.util import HashMap
>>> map = HashMap()
>>> map.put('asdf', 'test')

Jep is an open source project that embeds CPython in Java.