Both dates are in current use and neither is going to win.
Japanese temples keep Nehan-e mostly on February 15, some on February 8. Chinese and Korean communities divide. Tibetan and Bhutanese Buddhists compute from their own lunar calendars and arrive somewhere else entirely, in Bhutan, the fifteenth day of the fourth month.
The cause is straightforward. The passing was remembered on a lunar date. Converting a lunar date to a fixed calendar requires choosing a reference year, and different countries did this at different times under different reforms, principally Japan's move to the Gregorian calendar in 1873. Different choices produced different fixed dates, and there is no authority across Buddhist schools who could adjudicate between them. Nobody has tried very hard, because the point of the day does not depend on it.
Theravada countries do not keep the day at all as a separate observance. Birth, awakening and passing are held to have occurred on the same full moon and are marked together at Vesak, which is why Parinirvana Day is a Mahayana holiday on a map of Buddhist practice.
What is read
The Mahaparinibbana Sutta is the long account of the Buddha's final months: the journey, the illness, the last instructions, the request that the community take the teaching and the discipline as teacher after him. Its detail about the final meal offered by Cunda the smith has been argued about for more than a century, the Pali term sukaramaddava has been read as pork, as something pigs eat, as truffles, and as a plant, and the argument is not resolved and carries some weight for vegetarian Buddhists.
In Japan the day is visual. Large painted nehanzu, kept rolled up the rest of the year, are hung: the Buddha lying on his right side between the sal trees, the disciples, and the assembled animals, all of them grieving except those who have understood.