1942 Japanese general election

General elections were held in Japan on 30 April 1942 to elect members of the House of Representatives. They were the only elections held in Japan during the Pacific theater of World War II. By this time, the House of Representatives had lost all power to the military dictatorship, a process that started with the "Manchurian Incident" when the Imperial Army invaded Manchuria without approval from the (then still civilian) cabinet in 1931. Since 1932 when Admiral Viscount Saitō Makoto was appointed prime minister with the first so-called "national unity cabinet", few members of the political parties in the House of Representatives had any significant role in government. Additionally, the military had at this point transformed Japan into a totalitarian one-party state.