This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Buddhism had arrived in Japan only decades before Empress Suiko's reign, brought from Baekje on the Korean peninsula, a documented recent arrival distinct from a religion already long established in Japanese court life by the time she took the throne in 593. Her decades on the throne saw significant expansion of Buddhist temple building under court patronage, a documented material expansion distinct from a religion that remained a matter of private household practice without state backed construction.
The court building and diplomatic activity carried out across her reign mark the point at which Buddhism became an established feature of Japanese religious and political life, a documented consolidation distinct from a Buddhism still confined to the status of a recent foreign import. That establishment proceeded alongside the native cults later organized as Shinto, a documented coexistence distinct from one tradition displacing the other outright during her reign.
That the decades during which Buddhism changed from a recent arrival from Baekje into an established feature of the Japanese state fall within the reign of Suiko, the first sovereign recorded ruling Japan as empress in her own right, marks her reign as a documented case where a foreign religion's consolidation in Japan and a woman's own unprecedented sovereignty are dated to the very same span of years.