is a generic Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 term for a dish of seafood

Seafood

Seafood is any form of marine life regarded as food by humans. Seafoods include fish, molluscs , crustaceans , echinoderms . Edible sea plants, such as some seaweeds and microalgae, are also seafood, and are widely eaten around the world, especially in Asia...

 which is filleted, boned and dipped in a sweet soy sauce

Soy sauce

Soy sauce is a condiment produced by fermenting soybeans with Aspergillus oryzae or Aspergillus sojae molds, along with water and salt...

-base sauce before broiled on a grill. In general, kabayaki refers to the dish made with unagi

Unagi

Unagi is the Japanese word for freshwater eels, especially the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica. Saltwater eels are known as anago in Japanese. Unagi are a common ingredient in Japanese cooking...

. Kabayaki eel is very popular as a nutritious, stamina-generating food. Many people still follow customs from the Edo period

Edo period

The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....

 to eat kabayaki during the summer, especially on a particular day called "doyo-no ushi-no-hi", which is in mid-summer. In the Kantō region

Kanto region

The is a geographical area of Honshu, the largest island of Japan. The region includes the Greater Tokyo Area and encompasses seven prefectures: Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Saitama, Tokyo, Chiba, and Kanagawa. Within its boundaries, slightly more than 40 percent of the land area is the Kantō Plain....

 (eastern Japan), an eel is filleted from its back and is steamed before grilling, while in the Kansai region (western Japan) it is opened at the belly and directly grilled without being steamed. While kabayaki is often served alone, it is also served with rice and called unadon

Unadon

An Unadon is a popular donburi dish made with unagi kabayaki, grilled eel coated with a sweet sauce....

when it is in a large bowl and unaju when in a tiered food box. A related dish is mamushi (which is not related to the snake of the same name

Gloydius blomhoffii

Gloydius blomhoffii, commonly known as the mamushi, or Japanese mamushi, is a venomous pitviper species found in China, Japan, and Korea. There are four subspecies including the nominate subspecies described here....

).