Metalloporphyrins with electron-withdrawing substitutes, such as carboxyl groups, at the meso-positions, and those immobilized on inorganic supports act as efficient and selective catalysts for the oxidation of hydrocarbons. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Porphyrin ligands with electron-withdrawing substitutes (PPEW) are currently of interest as precursors to stable metalloporphyrin catalysts for a variety of hydrocarbon-oxygenation reactions that are important for future energy development. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] The effect of electronwithdrawing groups on the electron states of porphyrin macrocycles, especially of four nitrogen atoms in the porphine ring, is an important issue for studies in not only analytical chemistry, but also in coordination chemistry because it is related to the protonation of nitrogen atoms in the porphine ring and to the stability of metalloporphyrin complexes.Changes of the local structure and electronic states between four nitrogen atoms and protons in the porphine ring in the PPEW ligand have been elucidated using ab initio calculations 20 and ionization potentials. The results of local-density functional calculations and spectroscopic studies show that they are different from the meso and β positions of a variety of multiple substituents (alkyl-, aryl-, fluoro-, chloro-, bromo-, trifluoromethyl cyano-, nitro-, etc.) in the PPEW that were provided. 21 However, information regarding molecular orbitals (MOs), including the atomic orbitals of nitrogen in these literatures was not investigated. On the other hand, because the effect of electron-withdrawing groups strongly affects the energy level of the 1s orbital for nitrogen, it is necessary to reveal the electronic effect. Therefore, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is a very suitable method because it is possible to observe the atomic orbital with a characteristic energy. In addition, the X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) provides an effective verification of the local structure of an absorbing atom. So far, a correlation between the energy of the 1s orbital for N in a porphine ring and the electron-withdrawing strength of meso-substituents in the PPEW has been reported to be a result of XPS and ab initio calculations. 22 On the other hand, N K XANES measurements of porphyrins have been reported for the orientation and electronic structure of macromolecular arrays containing porphyrins, 23 porphyrin thin film, 24 porphyrins in petroleum asphaltenes, 25 and porphyrins with adsorbed nitrogen monoxide. 26 Nevertheless, few studies have used a combination of XPS and XANES, a correlation between the protonation to nitrogen atoms in a porphine ring, and the strength of electronwithdrawing groups in a meso-substituted porphyrin. To show correlations in this study, the spectra of N 1s XPS and N K XANES for tetrakis(p-carboxyphenyl)porphyrin (TCPP) were measured and analyzed from an electronic state calculation using the discrete variational (DV)-Xα MO method, 27 which is a first-principle calculation that is u...