In reply to Tohil.

I believe the JSON engine tries to use utf8 by default. If your JSON content is actually encoded differently, use ENCODING= on the JSON libname statement to influence how it reads the data.

If the session encoding is the culprit, is it possible to start a SAS session with the encoding you need just for this purpose, to read this data? If working with a central environment, perhaps your admin can create a "SASApp - UTF8" logical server that you can use to get the data into a SAS data set.