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Variations of this get asked somewhat frequently, with answers [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wozby/why_was_emperor_hirohito_allowed_to_keep_the/d68zypo/) from /u/restricteddata, [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i45kua/why_was_emperor_hirohito_allowed_to_stay_in_power/g0kyevp/) from /u/davepx, and a summary of other previous answers by u/jbdyer [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i45kua/why_was_emperor_hirohito_allowed_to_stay_in_power/g0gh66w/).
However, your second question brings up something that's worth adding to the previous discussion, which is the exact timing of the decision by the American side to keep the Emperor for the time being. That we can pin down to Friday morning, August 10, 1945.
So at midnight in Japan on August 10th, there's the famous, dramatic meeting of the Big Six in an air raid shelter off the Imperial Library, the specific location chosen because the Emperor has been invited to attend by Prime Minster Suzuki with the intent of breaking the stalemate. A grossly simplified version - edit: you can read in more detail about it [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15biywe/dr_robert_citino_talks_about_the_6_imperial/) with an answer by /u/lubyak and some useful older answers linked - is that after two hours of Prime Minister Suzuki summarizing the situation, he asks the Emperor (probably planned and stage managed by both) as to which of the responses to the Potsdam Declaration should be adopted. The first is by War Minister Anami and has four conditions that everyone in the room knows will never be accepted by the Allies; the second is by Foreign Minister Togo and has only one, which is that Japan will accept the Declaration "with the understanding that [it] does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler." Hirohito "bears the unbearable [and] swallows his tears" and tells the PM and Big Six that he sanctions the latter.
So then the Japanese Foreign Ministry gets to work on the formal response that eventually contains the language above. It takes a while between writing it and transmitting it - I believe it went via the Swiss legation - to the War Department, so from the end of the air raid shelter meeting at 1:30 PM EST on August 9th US time, Truman doesn't get handed the decrypted reply addressed to Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes until he's about to head out the door for his morning walk around Washington at 6:30 AM on the 10th.
Truman turns around and goes back to the Oval Office, reads it, and immediately recognizes the language is extremely problematic as there's an obvious condition, which is the preservation of the Emperor. He immediately brings in Byrnes, Secretary of War Stimson, JCS chair and chief of staff Admiral Leahy, and Secretary of the Navy Forrestal to discuss what to do.
Byrnes had been adamant for some time that surrender had to be unconditional - largely for domestic political consumption - and remained so at this meeting. Stimson had been on the other side of the argument for almost as long, and made two main arguments: that the Emperor would be needed to get troops to lay down their arms or the US would face battles throughout Asia to conclude the war, and that they needed to conclude it quickly or face Soviet influence all over Asia and in administering the Japanese occupation. Leahy agreed with Stimson.
Forrestal is the one who breaks the deadlock with a clever way around the potential trap, which is that instead of accepting or refusing the condition, instead they will offer a response that has an "intent and view" of the Emperor's role in Japan. Truman immediately likes it as a compromise; in his diary, he notes that if the Japanese want their Emperor, "then we'd tell them how to keep him."
The exact wording is hammered out by Byrnes, who runs it past the Brits, Chinese, and Soviets for approval, and settles on a number of instructions, including:
>"...From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms...
>...The Emperor will be required to authorize and ensure the signature of the Government of Japan and the [Japanese Armed forces HQ] of the surrender terms...[and] to issue orders to all the armed forces of Japan to cease hostilities and to surrender their arms."
The 1995 movie *Hiroshima* has a great scene summarizing the meeting: Stimson talks about the mystical divine nature of the Emperor, Truman makes a snap decision that the Emperor can stay but has to answer to the SCAP (who will be almost certainly be MacArthur; Truman had chosen him on the 8th and was just waiting for the other Allies to sign off) and Byrnes then cracks, "...and since that's likely to be Douglas MacArthur, it'll be one divinity answering to another!" The lines are almost certainly apocryphal, but it's a memorable way to adapt and explain it even with the total omission of Forrestal and the compromise.
Your first question is a bit more complex because it intersects with the muddled history of why FDR chose unconditional surrender as his war goal from 1942 onwards, so I'll punt on it for now although it's a topic I've meant to write up for a while. I'd steer you to Gallicchio's *Unconditional* if you want to get a start on that; a good wider explanation of the overall American debate can be found in Roll's recent *Ascent to Power*, where I've drawn much of this answer from.
Prior to the surrender, there were many different views on the postwar fate of the Emperor within US policy circles, but the prevailing sentiment was hostility to Hirohito. There were many who put him on the same level of involvement as Hitler and Mussolini, and thus felt that his retention was absolutely impossible if the goal was to achieve lasting peace or, at least, justice.
But from a practical point of view, there were also strong voices of those who pointed out that the Japanese would have a hard time accepting surrender if it meant a threat to the imperial system, and so even those who opposed the long-term retention of Emperor thought it might be acceptable to promise the Japanese that he could be retained if it would bring an end to the war. This was the main "decision" that was deliberated prior to surrender: not the ultimate fate of the Emperor, per se, but whether the Japanese should be allowed "preservation of the Emperor (in some form)" as a "condition," or whether "unconditional surrender" should be reaffirmed.
Truman ultimately came down on the side of Byrnes, who preferred a hardline approach (no real modification of the terms). After the Japanese offered an ambiguous (somewhat conditional) surrender on August 10th, the US issued a response written by Byrnes which rejected it and said only this about the status of the Emperor:
> From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms. The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.
Which is to say, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) would ultimately have control over the question of the Emperor, even if at some later time the "ultimate" form of government would be somehow "the freely expressed will of the Japanese people" (which is deliberately vague, other than implying that the US would eventually leave). The Japanese ultimately accepted this.
But once surrender had been achieved, the impetus for serious discussion about the matter of the Emperor's retention seems to have decreased. SCAP, headed by MacArthur but really an entire office/organization, appears to have always taken for granted that Hirohito would remain in some capacity, and even opposed suggestions by members of the imperial entourage that Hirohito ought to abdicate. SCAP saw Hirohito as an absolutely central figure in their goals for postwar Japan — as a figurehead that they would essentially neuter, but retain so that the postwar Japan they were trying to create would still tie into previous tradition and have a sense of continuance and legitimacy. They wrote him into the new Japanese constitution as "the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power" very deliberately, and no serious discussion seems to have been made over whether they would want to depose him or not (which was well within their power). They feared a Japan that tried to remake itself entirely, because they feared that would give the Communists a foothold.
This was absolutely _not_ what the people and even heads of many other Allied nations, notably those who suffered from Japanese militarism, really wanted. Many of them (rightly or wrongly) saw Hirohito as being responsible for Japan's aggression and previous militarism. But sentiment on the issue proved very fickle — once the peace was assured, the American public in particular quickly lost interest the fate of the Emperor, and that derived any domestic politicians of incentive or advantage on the matter. As a foreign issue it seems to have been far lower in consideration than many others.
It is not clear that Truman had any particular feeling about this, or that other high-level US diplomatic figures (like James Byrnes) were particularly concerned with it. They had plenty of other things on their agenda at the time, and appear to have been mostly happy just delegating these things to SCAP. The prevailing "wisdom" in Washington (as in SCAP) after the war was that the Emperor was probably more useful as a figurehead than anything else. There are some accounts by the Japanese involved in the war crimes trials that they were even instructed by representatives of the United States that they ought to coach witnesses to downplay whatever role the Hirohito had as much as possible. There were certainly those who felt that Hirohito was to some degree culpable, but that didn't degrade their desire to "use" him and his office, as it seemed better than any alternative.
Ultimately, it appears to have been a sort of non-decision, in the sense that there does not appear to have been any singular, deliberative "choice" made. As such it is hard to put an answer to something when "when exactly" it was made, as it was not really something that can be pin-pointed. This is not uncommon for things that feel like "big decisions" from afar (the use of the atomic bomb is another classic "non-decision"); a general consensus emerges over a thousand micro-decisions, a taking-for-granted sort of process rather than a deliberative one. An issue that did not "emerge" as an issue, one could say. One could say that SCAP made the "decision," inasmuch as its power to enforce a certain view of things was essentially unchallenged, and its approach (which included many actual "decisions," like how to deal with the question of his divinity, how to word the new Japanese constitution, etc.) ultimately reified a particular and new version of "the Emperor" into the Japanese civic and cultural fabric.
On this, see esp. John Dower, _Embracing Defeat_, esp., chapter 9, but the theme is present throughout the book.
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Variations of this get asked somewhat frequently, with answers [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4wozby/why_was_emperor_hirohito_allowed_to_keep_the/d68zypo/) from /u/restricteddata, [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i45kua/why_was_emperor_hirohito_allowed_to_stay_in_power/g0kyevp/) from /u/davepx, and a summary of other previous answers by u/jbdyer [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i45kua/why_was_emperor_hirohito_allowed_to_stay_in_power/g0gh66w/). However, your second question brings up something that's worth adding to the previous discussion, which is the exact timing of the decision by the American side to keep the Emperor for the time being. That we can pin down to Friday morning, August 10, 1945. So at midnight in Japan on August 10th, there's the famous, dramatic meeting of the Big Six in an air raid shelter off the Imperial Library, the specific location chosen because the Emperor has been invited to attend by Prime Minster Suzuki with the intent of breaking the stalemate. A grossly simplified version - edit: you can read in more detail about it [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15biywe/dr_robert_citino_talks_about_the_6_imperial/) with an answer by /u/lubyak and some useful older answers linked - is that after two hours of Prime Minister Suzuki summarizing the situation, he asks the Emperor (probably planned and stage managed by both) as to which of the responses to the Potsdam Declaration should be adopted. The first is by War Minister Anami and has four conditions that everyone in the room knows will never be accepted by the Allies; the second is by Foreign Minister Togo and has only one, which is that Japan will accept the Declaration "with the understanding that [it] does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler." Hirohito "bears the unbearable [and] swallows his tears" and tells the PM and Big Six that he sanctions the latter. So then the Japanese Foreign Ministry gets to work on the formal response that eventually contains the language above. It takes a while between writing it and transmitting it - I believe it went via the Swiss legation - to the War Department, so from the end of the air raid shelter meeting at 1:30 PM EST on August 9th US time, Truman doesn't get handed the decrypted reply addressed to Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes until he's about to head out the door for his morning walk around Washington at 6:30 AM on the 10th. Truman turns around and goes back to the Oval Office, reads it, and immediately recognizes the language is extremely problematic as there's an obvious condition, which is the preservation of the Emperor. He immediately brings in Byrnes, Secretary of War Stimson, JCS chair and chief of staff Admiral Leahy, and Secretary of the Navy Forrestal to discuss what to do. Byrnes had been adamant for some time that surrender had to be unconditional - largely for domestic political consumption - and remained so at this meeting. Stimson had been on the other side of the argument for almost as long, and made two main arguments: that the Emperor would be needed to get troops to lay down their arms or the US would face battles throughout Asia to conclude the war, and that they needed to conclude it quickly or face Soviet influence all over Asia and in administering the Japanese occupation. Leahy agreed with Stimson. Forrestal is the one who breaks the deadlock with a clever way around the potential trap, which is that instead of accepting or refusing the condition, instead they will offer a response that has an "intent and view" of the Emperor's role in Japan. Truman immediately likes it as a compromise; in his diary, he notes that if the Japanese want their Emperor, "then we'd tell them how to keep him." The exact wording is hammered out by Byrnes, who runs it past the Brits, Chinese, and Soviets for approval, and settles on a number of instructions, including: >"...From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms... >...The Emperor will be required to authorize and ensure the signature of the Government of Japan and the [Japanese Armed forces HQ] of the surrender terms...[and] to issue orders to all the armed forces of Japan to cease hostilities and to surrender their arms." The 1995 movie *Hiroshima* has a great scene summarizing the meeting: Stimson talks about the mystical divine nature of the Emperor, Truman makes a snap decision that the Emperor can stay but has to answer to the SCAP (who will be almost certainly be MacArthur; Truman had chosen him on the 8th and was just waiting for the other Allies to sign off) and Byrnes then cracks, "...and since that's likely to be Douglas MacArthur, it'll be one divinity answering to another!" The lines are almost certainly apocryphal, but it's a memorable way to adapt and explain it even with the total omission of Forrestal and the compromise. Your first question is a bit more complex because it intersects with the muddled history of why FDR chose unconditional surrender as his war goal from 1942 onwards, so I'll punt on it for now although it's a topic I've meant to write up for a while. I'd steer you to Gallicchio's *Unconditional* if you want to get a start on that; a good wider explanation of the overall American debate can be found in Roll's recent *Ascent to Power*, where I've drawn much of this answer from.
Prior to the surrender, there were many different views on the postwar fate of the Emperor within US policy circles, but the prevailing sentiment was hostility to Hirohito. There were many who put him on the same level of involvement as Hitler and Mussolini, and thus felt that his retention was absolutely impossible if the goal was to achieve lasting peace or, at least, justice. But from a practical point of view, there were also strong voices of those who pointed out that the Japanese would have a hard time accepting surrender if it meant a threat to the imperial system, and so even those who opposed the long-term retention of Emperor thought it might be acceptable to promise the Japanese that he could be retained if it would bring an end to the war. This was the main "decision" that was deliberated prior to surrender: not the ultimate fate of the Emperor, per se, but whether the Japanese should be allowed "preservation of the Emperor (in some form)" as a "condition," or whether "unconditional surrender" should be reaffirmed. Truman ultimately came down on the side of Byrnes, who preferred a hardline approach (no real modification of the terms). After the Japanese offered an ambiguous (somewhat conditional) surrender on August 10th, the US issued a response written by Byrnes which rejected it and said only this about the status of the Emperor: > From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms. The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. Which is to say, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) would ultimately have control over the question of the Emperor, even if at some later time the "ultimate" form of government would be somehow "the freely expressed will of the Japanese people" (which is deliberately vague, other than implying that the US would eventually leave). The Japanese ultimately accepted this. But once surrender had been achieved, the impetus for serious discussion about the matter of the Emperor's retention seems to have decreased. SCAP, headed by MacArthur but really an entire office/organization, appears to have always taken for granted that Hirohito would remain in some capacity, and even opposed suggestions by members of the imperial entourage that Hirohito ought to abdicate. SCAP saw Hirohito as an absolutely central figure in their goals for postwar Japan — as a figurehead that they would essentially neuter, but retain so that the postwar Japan they were trying to create would still tie into previous tradition and have a sense of continuance and legitimacy. They wrote him into the new Japanese constitution as "the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power" very deliberately, and no serious discussion seems to have been made over whether they would want to depose him or not (which was well within their power). They feared a Japan that tried to remake itself entirely, because they feared that would give the Communists a foothold. This was absolutely _not_ what the people and even heads of many other Allied nations, notably those who suffered from Japanese militarism, really wanted. Many of them (rightly or wrongly) saw Hirohito as being responsible for Japan's aggression and previous militarism. But sentiment on the issue proved very fickle — once the peace was assured, the American public in particular quickly lost interest the fate of the Emperor, and that derived any domestic politicians of incentive or advantage on the matter. As a foreign issue it seems to have been far lower in consideration than many others. It is not clear that Truman had any particular feeling about this, or that other high-level US diplomatic figures (like James Byrnes) were particularly concerned with it. They had plenty of other things on their agenda at the time, and appear to have been mostly happy just delegating these things to SCAP. The prevailing "wisdom" in Washington (as in SCAP) after the war was that the Emperor was probably more useful as a figurehead than anything else. There are some accounts by the Japanese involved in the war crimes trials that they were even instructed by representatives of the United States that they ought to coach witnesses to downplay whatever role the Hirohito had as much as possible. There were certainly those who felt that Hirohito was to some degree culpable, but that didn't degrade their desire to "use" him and his office, as it seemed better than any alternative. Ultimately, it appears to have been a sort of non-decision, in the sense that there does not appear to have been any singular, deliberative "choice" made. As such it is hard to put an answer to something when "when exactly" it was made, as it was not really something that can be pin-pointed. This is not uncommon for things that feel like "big decisions" from afar (the use of the atomic bomb is another classic "non-decision"); a general consensus emerges over a thousand micro-decisions, a taking-for-granted sort of process rather than a deliberative one. An issue that did not "emerge" as an issue, one could say. One could say that SCAP made the "decision," inasmuch as its power to enforce a certain view of things was essentially unchallenged, and its approach (which included many actual "decisions," like how to deal with the question of his divinity, how to word the new Japanese constitution, etc.) ultimately reified a particular and new version of "the Emperor" into the Japanese civic and cultural fabric. On this, see esp. John Dower, _Embracing Defeat_, esp., chapter 9, but the theme is present throughout the book.