How to deal with the emperor?

In Sept. 1945, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution that Hirohito be brought to trial. Brigadier General Bonner Fellers advised against it. Fellers could have been informed by Joseph Grew, U.S. ambassador to Japan (1931-41), who had advised keeping the emperor as a symbol of national unity. Fellers was MacArthur’s military secretary. He argued that the emperor was the living symbol of the race in whom lay the virtue of their ancestors. If the emperor was tried, general uprising would be inevitable. According to Dower, the majority of the Japanese would like to keep the emperor; but a lot could not care less. To keep the emperor, the SCAP helped to find the emperor innocent, although there was ample evidence suggesting otherwise. Dower strongly argues that the emperor played a negative role in WWII or even during the occupation (277-8, 291-2, 296, 311-7): Emperor was responsible for war (although tried to hide it); He also resisted his new role as a secular ruler. During the occupation, the Americans wanted to take away the divinity of the emperor; the emperor complied with his new human status by issuing a declaration that did not disagree with an earlier notion that he was a descendant of the divine; moreover, his denunciation of his “manifest deity” was couched in archaic Japanese that many could not understand. Dower depicts Hirohito as a war criminal and unrepentant after the war to cater to his American audience. Different interpretations have depicted Hirohito as a constitutional monarch, who would not go against the majority in the government. What do you think? What were the alternatives to keeping Emperor Hirohito? This is a hypothetical question, but one considered by the American occupational forces and some Japanese, too. Hirohito considered abdication on three occasions: right after the war (then did not know if emperor system could be kept), after the Tokyo trial (then kept because of MacArthur), and then after the San Francisco peace treaty was signed. Kido Kiyoshi, a class A criminal, asked him to resign, otherwise creating confusion to the Japanese public. During San Francisco treaty signing, Hirohito read out his doubt of service. But it was drowned in cheers of independence. The possibility to have Hirohito abdicate but keep the imperial house was proposed by liberals, socialists, etc., and even Hirohito's own brother, but it was not realized for fear that the emperor then would be tried as war criminal. Keeping the emperor and not trying him as a war criminal would have significant ramifications for later Japanese history, politics, and culture, which we will see in later readings.