@rher @veff It's been a hot minute since I did any study on timber framing, especially japanese style timber framing, but it's a lot closer to furniture construction than it is to modern carpentry.
They used fasteners. They weren't swaging metal screws, obviously, but they used tree nails (actual naturally-shaped wooden nails) and square pegs (a square wooden peg going into a round hole will "bite" into it and crush a bit to get a better hold. That alone is superior to the use of metal fasteners that oxidize and "rot" when exposed to the elements, because wooden fasteners will expand and contract due to changes in humidity and temperature at a similar scale to the wooden structure around them (ignore cross-grain difference, these structures are also generally designed with expansion and contraction in mind).
They're also frequently designed in such a way to be disassembled in case any given part needs replaced, though they're designed with superior lumber to the shit stick frame pineslop you see here in the states, so it generally lasts longer to begin with. You see this with a lot of the old massive shrines that need routine maintenance around Japan and have lasted hundreds of years being made almost completely out of wood and are only now reaching the point where the end of lifetime wear is hitting them.
Furthermore, if we're getting into the philosophy of things, a style of construction that takes more time and effort is going to inherently cause both the people that built it and those that own it to care for it more. Japanese carpenters traditionally leave sumitsubo (the hand-carved japanese ink version of a chalk line) in the houses they build as a sort of maker's mark type deal. You don't do that sort of thing, putting your pride as a creator on the line if you don't care.
The industrial revolution was a fucking mistake. We had shit so good and it wasn't enough. We could have lived in nice stable lifestyles, with architecture that was in tune with nature, plenty of wild land to explore, not enough people for pollution to become a serious concern, etc. But NOOOOOO! We just had to make things "better" and "more efficient" for what? Money? Infinite population growth forever? All across the world civilization began dying in the 1700s and probably won't recover. Computers and AI slop are a fucking joke. Timber framing is awesome.