  We study the origin of fermion mass hierarchy and flavor mixing in the
standard model, paying attention to flavor symmetries and fermion kinetic
terms. There is a possibility that the hierarchical flavor structure of quarks
and charged leptons originates from non-canonical types of fermion kinetic
terms in the presence of flavor symmetric Yukawa interactions. A flavor
symmetry can be hidden in the form of non-unitary bases in the standard model.
The structure of K\"{a}hler potential can become a touchstone of new physics.
