Is the son of master Kenichi Sawai and started young learning Taikiken from his father and is known by his students as a real Taikiken stylist.
He is member of Master Kenichi Sawai sensei’s first generation Taikiken students who did train in Meiji jingu, where he trained with Taikiken people like Hatsuo Royama, Yoshimichi Sato, Mikio Goto; Kazuo Yoshida; Norimasa lwama; Yukio Ito; Masashi Saito; Yasuo Matsumura; Mitsuo Nakamura; Jan Kallenbach; and Roland Nansink.
He participated in the first English book on Taikiken published in 1976.
Akio Sawai sensei was one of the first Taikiken instructors who came to Europe in the early nineteen seventies of the last century. He and Iwama Norimasa did teach together in the Jan Kallenbach's Shin Bu Ken dojo in Amsterdam. That was the beginning of Taikiken in the Netherlands