require is meant for loading your modules; the recommended way to load files (including the JSON ones) is through Node's filesystem module.

You could do something like this:

// Declare your variables
var fs = require('fs');
var menObject;

// Read the file, and pass it to your callback
fs.readFile('./men.json, handleJSONFile);

// Handle the data 
var handleJSONFile = function (err, data) {
    if (err) {
        throw err;
    }
    menObject = JSON.parse(data);
}

Thanks to TypeScript 2.x Wildcard Module Declarations you can do the following:

Somewhere in a *.d.ts file add this (or check if its already there):

declare module "*.json"
{ const value: any;
  export default value;
}
declare module "json!*"
{ const value: any;
  export default value;
}

Then you can do things like this in your TypeScript code:

import * as data1 from './data/some.json';
import data2 from "json!foo.com/data_returns_json";

Note: I think this is already part of the ES6/ES2015 standard if you're writing plain JS targeting ES6/ES2015.

You can import only .ts or .tsx file using typescript imports

This can be done in two ways: a)if you want to import JSON you may have to use "require"

b) Copy the json and assign the JSON to a varaible and store it in a .ts file . In this case the variable will hold the json object . You can now import this .ts file using typescript type of imports and start using the object