Nishio was awarded the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon from the Emperor of Japan in 2011 for his outstanding and important academic contributions.

[5] He received the Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award in the information science and technology field from the MEXT, Japan in 2014.

[6] In 2016, he was named a Person of Cultural Merit for his significant achievements in the field of Information Science,[7][8] the title that confers among the highest honors and distinctions for academics in Japan.

He served as the Program Committee (PC) Co-Chairs for several international conferences including DOOD 1989, VLDB 1995, and IEEE ICDE 2005.

He served as a member of the executive committee of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering (Asia Coordinator) (1992-1997), the vice-chair and PC Chair of the Japan Chapter of ACM SIGMOD (1994-1995), and a member of the Board of Directors of the VLDB Endowment (2002-2007).