For what it's worth,

German colonists in Central America brought with them their traditional timber framing forms and put them to use in the New World. Many of the places where the Germans settled were earthquake prone. However, the German building style survived, and proved its ability to withstand earthquakes. Some of the original colonial ear buildings are still standing. Regions with German heritage are easy to spot by their steep-sloped roofs and tendency toward half-timber construction while their neighbors tend toward a more Spanish style of building -so yes to answer your question there is indeed a strong Spanish school of timber framing, and we can find it in practice still among their descendants in south in Central America (who are estimated to be something like 80-90% Spanish by blood in most areas, due to the impact of European diseases which nearly wiped out the native population in all but the most remote regions.)

I do have a bit of background is seismic engineering. I'm no expert by any means but I understand the basic concepts, and maybe a bit beyond that. The notion that buildings must flex during seismic loading, as stiff ones will fail, is a bit of an over-simplification. Stiff buildings can do well, provided they possess the structural means of dissipating the seismic forces. I can't recall where I read it, but I do remember having read that the German Fachwerk (light frame and brick infill) are able to withstand the earthquakes because they are very efficient in transferring the energy out of the frame. By pure luck, the frames the Germans brought with them that were not designed to resist earthquakes proved capable of doing so. I'll have to track down my sources on this, I'm sure you'd be interested in it. Even in the US today, some seismic engineering relies on flexibility while others are designed be stiff and very efficiently transfer the forces (with unpredictable direction and intensity but predictable origin, i.e. you know an earthquake will attack at the foundation) out. Both have their own advantages and drawbacks.

When it comes to buildings lacking oblique bracing, this is not a strictly Asiatic phenomenon. Actually this concept is likely far older than the use of bracing as we are used to it. In a sense, you could say the Japanese method is considerably more archaic than anything used in the West today. Similar concepts appear (we can't know for sure, as we have a very limited amount of information to work with) throughout the Mediterranean. Greek, Etruscan, and by extension Roman architecture -while classically in stone, derives from a type of wooden architecture that did not involve any sort of long bracing members but rather relied on locking joinery at the tops of the posts and interlocking bracketed timbers in the roof (according, at least, to Vitruvius and other Roman era writers who were writing a few centuries after the last of these structures were built) Classical stone architecture reflects this, the capitols of the columns and the construction of the portions above the columns all reflect the wooden origins. Even Egyptian architecture reflects similar origins, with early Old Kingdom stone architecture emulating reed bundles and palm logs used to construct their immediate predecessors.

We can find some similarities here; Italy, Greece, and much of the Ancient Near East are all earthquake-prone, and they appear to have at one time used techniques very similar (if not considerably less developed) to what we still see in east Asia today.
The simple explanation as to why these sorts of techniques are not found in the west today is that Mediterranean and Mesopotamian cultures typically abandoned timber framing methods in favor of heavy stone architecture (or in some cases never possessed suitable timber resources to ever have any sort of rich timber building tradition). The timber frames in the former Roman world today stem from largely Germanic or central Asian (Turkic and Hunnish) sources, and as such spent a few centuries developing in a totally different part of the world.

So all of this long-winded talk is to illustrate the point that all of this is far from simple, and very little understood by anyone. There are a lot of different approaches to Timber Framing in general, some spectacular and some not, but all with something worth studying. There are many different solutions to bracing, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages.

The German system was designed with a goal in mind, that goal was to create a style of building that was as efficient as possible from a materials standpoint while maintaining and even increasing upon the ability of a timber frame to endure loading both static and dynamic. In the early industrial era this design was pressed even further, and the northern Swiss styles of rural Riegelbau construction are the result of this push for efficiency.

Asian tradition seems to be driven by a different set of values. This is not by any means an insult, just an observation. The Japanese as I understand it refined their systems into a delicate art -like they did with most things. The craftsmanship is superb and their accomplishments admirable, however we do well to recognize a different set of ideals behind their developments when contrasting with European systems.

Also I should say this; there are indeed braces that are designed to work only in tension. I've seen hundreds of them (if not thousands) during my travels. This used to be a very typical Central European phenomenon. Many structures with light plank infills relied on thin (like, 1 or 2 inch) plank braces on the outside to hold the structure. These relied on tension joinery -in this case a family of refined and specially designed dovetail-like joints- and were useless under compression. In fact, some joints appear to have been designed to 'pop out' if the braces came under compression, this same shape of the joint causing it to become tighter and stronger under tension. This type of joint evolved as a solution to the challenge of having to add braces after the walls, infill and all, were erected. The only practical way to do this was to use relatively thin braces that were inserted from the outside and face-pegged in place. This is an almost universal feature of old central European and Alpine timber frames relying on light plank infill, and is recognized as a Celtic technology (in contrast with archaic Germanic technologies that relied on let-in bracing that appears to have been designed to work primarily under compression, for example the bracing used in Anglo-Saxon and early Norman ere English structures). I am not aware of this technology existing anywhere else. It is worth noting that structures I have seen this sort of bracing on range in period of construction anywhere from the early 19th century to the late 13th century. For the most part, Swiss rural carpentry tended to view tension as the primary action of effective bracing, and the designs of their roof structures especially reflect this.