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.