Read unicode characters from TextAsset?

I have been trying to parse JSon formatted text file and load settings from it accordingly but TextAsset seems to ERASE any non ascii letters.

TextAsset.bytes or TextAssets.text does not contain any unicode characters. Is there any way to make it read as unicode?

I can use System.IO and force my way around it but as far as I'm concerned, it is not exactly platfrom friendly, at least when compared to using prefab linking system.