You are probably right about the source of the problem; I was confusing 
it with a regular exception, e.g.

print("年",a)

However, I also fail to reproduce the problem on OSX. I get

  File "a.py", line 3
    print "�N"
             ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I'm not quite sure what the N is doing in there, but the first character 
is the replacement character (hopefully, the tracker will reproduce it 
correctly); I get that because pythonrun uses the "replace" codec.

I guess you are not seeing it because then the replacement character 
cannot actually be output to your terminal. Please try

print("\ufffd")

to see what that does.