Right, though they're stuck on 1.8 (upgraded to 1.8 only so they could use python3), and really just use it for request/response/views, not ORM or anything else.
You just have to manually call json.parse(request.body) for incoming requests and return JsonResponse(data). And you generally need to serialize the data yourself.
Django does have some built-in model serialization, but that's mostly for import/export data, not really for sending to the browser.