This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Empress Suiko reigned over the Yamato court of Japan from 593 to 628 CE as the first Japanese sovereign recorded as a reigning empress in her own right, a documented status distinct from a woman who held the throne only as a consort or as regent for a son. That reign of thirty five years is documented as Japan's first recorded instance of a woman ruling as empress regnant rather than in either of those subordinate capacities.
Her reign is chiefly remembered for the government of her nephew and regent, whose reshaping of the early Japanese state, including the promotion of Buddhism as court policy, the patronage of temple building and the issuing of a code of court conduct, was all carried out formally in her name and under her authority, a documented arrangement distinct from a reign in which a regent's policy proceeded without the sovereign's own formal sanction standing behind it.
That the first Japanese sovereign recorded as ruling in her own right presided, for thirty five years, over a court whose regent's sweeping reforms were nonetheless issued under her own name and authority, marks Empress Suiko's reign as a documented case where the earliest instance of a woman's sole sovereignty in Japan and one of the most consequential regencies in its early history occupy the same throne at once.