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.