diff --git a/src/transformers/tokenization_bert_japanese.py b/src/transformers/tokenization_bert_japanese.py
index aaf82c54b32..d370e0dced0 100644
--- a/src/transformers/tokenization_bert_japanese.py
+++ b/src/transformers/tokenization_bert_japanese.py
@@ -89,6 +89,7 @@ class BertJapaneseTokenizer(BertTokenizer):
         pad_token="[PAD]",
         cls_token="[CLS]",
         mask_token="[MASK]",
+        mecab_kwargs=None,
         **kwargs
     ):
         """Constructs a MecabBertTokenizer.
@@ -106,6 +107,7 @@ class BertJapaneseTokenizer(BertTokenizer):
                 Type of word tokenizer.
             **subword_tokenizer_type**: (`optional`) string (default "wordpiece")
                 Type of subword tokenizer.
+            **mecab_kwargs**: (`optional`) dict passed to `MecabTokenizer` constructor (default None)
         """
         super(BertTokenizer, self).__init__(
             unk_token=unk_token,
@@ -134,7 +136,9 @@ class BertJapaneseTokenizer(BertTokenizer):
                     do_lower_case=do_lower_case, never_split=never_split, tokenize_chinese_chars=False
                 )
             elif word_tokenizer_type == "mecab":
-                self.word_tokenizer = MecabTokenizer(do_lower_case=do_lower_case, never_split=never_split)
+                self.word_tokenizer = MecabTokenizer(
+                    do_lower_case=do_lower_case, never_split=never_split, **(mecab_kwargs or {})
+                )
             else:
                 raise ValueError("Invalid word_tokenizer_type '{}' is specified.".format(word_tokenizer_type))
 
@@ -164,7 +168,7 @@ class BertJapaneseTokenizer(BertTokenizer):
 class MecabTokenizer(object):
     """Runs basic tokenization with MeCab morphological parser."""
 
-    def __init__(self, do_lower_case=False, never_split=None, normalize_text=True):
+    def __init__(self, do_lower_case=False, never_split=None, normalize_text=True, mecab_option=None):
         """Constructs a MecabTokenizer.
 
         Args:
@@ -176,6 +180,7 @@ class MecabTokenizer(object):
                 List of token not to split.
             **normalize_text**: (`optional`) boolean (default True)
                 Whether to apply unicode normalization to text before tokenization.
+            **mecab_option**: (`optional`) string passed to `MeCab.Tagger` constructor (default "")
         """
         self.do_lower_case = do_lower_case
         self.never_split = never_split if never_split is not None else []
@@ -183,7 +188,7 @@ class MecabTokenizer(object):
 
         import MeCab
 
-        self.mecab = MeCab.Tagger()
+        self.mecab = MeCab.Tagger(mecab_option) if mecab_option is not None else MeCab.Tagger()
 
     def tokenize(self, text, never_split=None, **kwargs):
         """Tokenizes a piece of text."""
diff --git a/tests/test_tokenization_bert_japanese.py b/tests/test_tokenization_bert_japanese.py
index 4900ff49da5..4e0925d7296 100644
--- a/tests/test_tokenization_bert_japanese.py
+++ b/tests/test_tokenization_bert_japanese.py
@@ -91,6 +91,20 @@ class BertJapaneseTokenizationTest(TokenizerTesterMixin, unittest.TestCase):
             ["アップルストア", "で", "iphone", "8", "が", "発売", "さ", "れ", "た", "。"],
         )
 
+    def test_mecab_tokenizer_with_option(self):
+        try:
+            tokenizer = MecabTokenizer(
+                do_lower_case=True, normalize_text=False, mecab_option="-d /usr/local/lib/mecab/dic/jumandic"
+            )
+        except RuntimeError:
+            # if dict doesn't exist in the system, previous code raises this error.
+            return
+
+        self.assertListEqual(
+            tokenizer.tokenize(" \tｱｯﾌﾟﾙストアでiPhone８ が  \n 発売された　。  "),
+            ["ｱｯﾌﾟﾙストア", "で", "iPhone", "８", "が", "発売", "さ", "れた", "\u3000", "。"],
+        )
+
     def test_mecab_tokenizer_no_normalize(self):
         tokenizer = MecabTokenizer(normalize_text=False)