That's not a Python 2 str, that's a unicode object. Those two things are not the same. The unicode string behaviour is (indeed mostly) the same as what Python 3

That's not a Python 2 str, that's a unicode object. Those two things are not the same. The unicode string behaviour is (indeed mostly) the same as what Python 3 calls a str. Python 2.7.13 (default, Dec 19 2016, 10:24:34) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.42.1)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> s = u'おはようございます' >>> type(s) <type 'unicode'> >>> s = 'おはようございます' >>> type(s) <type 'str'> Also, just doing a from __future__ import unicode_literals can cause problems in Python 2 if you're using other libraries that don't correctly handle str vs unicode or make assumptions about character encoding.