The paper is devoted to the issue of colour symbolism in poetic texts. Colour perception is an important part of world perception, which is reflected in traditional colour symbolism in different cultures. Colour epithets can acquire an additional or figurative meaning in literary works. The aim of the study is to identify the symbolism of the colour yellow in Japanese and Yakut poems. The study is novel in that it is the first to consider the symbolic realisation of the colour epithet “yellow” in the context of the linguocultural specifics of poetic texts by the Japanese poet Takamura Kotaro and the Yakut poet I. Gogolev. As a result of the study, it can be argued that the colour epithet “yellow” performs a certain symbolic function peculiar to the Japanese and the Yakut mentality in the texts of poems by the Japanese and the Yakut poets. In the poems of the Japanese poet, the symbolism of the colour yellow acquires an additional meaning of the “sad charm of things”, one of the basic aesthetic principles characteristic of Japanese culture as a whole. In the poems of the Yakut poet, the colour epithet “yellow” prevails in the traditional meanings for the Yakuts “old/withered”, “precious”, “warm”.